Report slams State Department FOIA process

A new report from the State Department’s internal watchdog says the agency repeatedly provided inadequate and inaccurate responses to Freedom of Information Act requests involving top agency officials, including a misleading answer to a request three years ago seeking information on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email use.

The report from State Department Inspector General Steve Linick points to a series of failures in the procedures the office of the secretary used to respond to public records requests, including a lack of written policies and training, as well as inconsistent oversight by senior personnel. The report also faulted the secretary’s office for a practice of not searching for emails responsive to FOIA requests unless the request specifically asked for emails or demanded “all records” on a topic.

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“These procedural weaknesses, coupled with the lack of oversight by leadership and failure to routinely search emails, appear to contribute to inaccurate and incomplete responses,” the report says.

The criticism in the report clearly encompasses Clinton’s tenure as well as that of current Secretary of State John Kerry, although it suggests the deficiencies may have been present for a decade or more.

The IG report is a headache for Clinton, who is currently the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination and has been trying to move past the controversy over her use of a private email account for official business as secretary of state. The FBI is investigating how classified information ended up in Clinton’s private account. In addition, Linick’s office is working on another report about the impact of officials’ use of private email accounts.

A Clinton campaign spokesman suggested that the flaws the inspector general found were not attributable to Clinton or her appointees.

"The Department had a preexisting process in place to handle the tens of thousands of requests it received annually, and that established process was followed by the Secretary and her staff throughout her tenure," spokesman Brian Fallon said.

Among the flawed FOIA responses highlighted in the new report is a letter sent to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington in May 2013 after the organization asked for details on email accounts used by Clinton. The request followed media reports that some top U.S. officials, including then-Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, used official alias accounts maintained under pseudonyms.

However, the IG report notes that at the time CREW was told no records could be found “dozens of senior officials throughout the department, including members of Secretary Clinton’s immediate staff, exchanged email with the Secretary using the personal accounts she used to conduct official business.”

The report says the inspector general’s office “found evidence that [Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills] was informed of the request at the time it was received and subsequently tasked staff to follow up.” According to the report, none of those officials appear to have reviewed the results of the search done in State’s files, and there was “no evidence” that those staffers who did the search and responded to CREW knew about Clinton’s private email setup.

Fallon said Mills "did absolutely nothing wrong" in the episode. He noted that State did not finalize its response to CREW until May 2013, several months after Mills and Clinton left the department. Fallon also noted that neither Mills nor other senior officials signed off on the response before it went out.

Curiously, CREW said last year it never received any final response to its FOIA request.

The report also points to extreme delays in other cases, such as an Associated Press request for Clinton’s schedules that was pending without substantive response for five years.

The inspector general review does not appear to explore whether aides in Clinton’s office contributed to delayed or inaccurate responses to FOIA requests involving other State Department offices, such as a POLITICO request regarding legal and ethics reviews of former President Bill Clinton’s paid speeches. That request was pending for four years before State began producing records.

The report also fails to shed light on State’s response to a Gawker request for emails former Clinton adviser Philippe Reines exchanged with 34 news organizations. That request initially received a “no records” response from State, even though State has now found 81,000 potentially responsive emails in its official files. At a court hearing last month, a government lawyer would not concede that the no-records response was inadequate.

The report blames some of State’s FOIA problems on inadequate FOIA-related staffing in the secretary’s office and at the State division that handles the processing of FOIA requests. Only one person in the so-called executive secretariat is assigned full time to FOIA searches, while another helps out on occasion, the report says.

Asked about the report, State Department spokesman John Kirby noted that Kerry moved last year to boost staffing in the agency’s FOIA offices and hired a transparency coordinator to beef up the agency’s FOIA and record-keeping practices.

“The Department is committed to transparency, and the issues addressed in this report have the full attention of Secretary Kerry and the Department’s senior staff. While the volume of State Freedom of Information Act requests has tripled since 2008, our resources to respond have not kept pace,” Kirby said. “We know we must continue to improve our FOIA responsiveness and are taking additional steps to do so. ... The Department has accepted all four of the Inspector General’s recommendations, and we are taking steps to address each of them. We remain committed not only to transparency but to making our efforts in that regard as efficient as possible.”

While the disclosure last March of Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email account as secretary drew attention to the State Department, reports of dysfunction in State’s FOIA operation have been accumulating for years. The new report notes that in 2012, State’s inspector general issued an “inspection” of State’s FOIA-focused Office of Information Programs & Services that found the division to be overwhelmed and mismanaged. The new report says staffing for IPS actually declined after the 2012 inspection was released.

The new report, set for official release on Thursday, was described Wednesday night by Fox News and subsequently obtained by POLITICO. The Washington Post first detailed the report’s criticism of the handling of CREW’s request.